Thuggery

Of course we couldn’t all come here on the Mayflower. . . .But I got here as soon as I could.” - Anton Cermak

On July 25, 1967, U.S. Army tanks rumbled down the burned-out streets of Detroit, Michigan. The tanks were part of a deployment of 4,700 battle-tested federal troops that President Lyndon Johnson had ordered into the city. It was the third day of the largest urban rebellion in the country’s history and had come less than two weeks after a similar uprising in Newark, New Jersey. Altogether, during that “long hot summer of 1967”, more than 150 riots erupted in largely Black neighborhoods in cities across America.

At the time I had just finished college and was awaiting my own orders into the army. What were then called race riots had a long history in this country, but this was different. I had never before seen tanks and heavily armed soldiers in American cities, firing on American citizens and being fired on in return. I was stunned.

Through the years, when I have taught American history courses, I have often shown videos from those riots. I have asked the students to think about what the videos can tell us about our country’s past and present. Such discussions of America’s history of racial strife may no longer be allowed under executive order number I-don’t-even-know-anymore, issued on March 27th and titled “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History.”

Last week a short video shocked me as much as those newsreels from 58 years ago. It showed the arrest of Rumeysa Ozturk, a Turkish graduate student at Tufts University. She was walking alone on a sidewalk in Somerville, Massachusetts, talking on her cellphone to her mother in Turkey, when an officer from Immigration and Customs Enforcement approached her and blocked her way. You can hear Rumeysa let out a small scream of fear – and you can hear a bystander ask, “Are you kidnapping her?” – as five other ICE officers appear from several directions and surround her. Masked and without visible identification, they take her phone and toss her backpack on the street, then handcuff her and hustle her into to a waiting car. Before the day was over, she would be in a detention facility in southern Louisiana, without access to her family or an attorney.

She has, as yet, been charged with no crime, and her only offense appears to be an op-ed she co-authored in The Tufts Daily newspaper. The article, which was published a year ago, urged Tufts President Sunil Kumar to adopt resolutions passed by the student senate to acknowledge Palestinian genocide in Gaza and divest from companies with ties to Israel. It is an opinion piece, and the four authors voice their strong opinions, nothing more. They call on the university to act, no one else. They do not mention Hamas. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has provided innuendo, but no proof, of her connection to campus unrest beyond the op-ed. Her friends are baffled by the allegations, saying they bear no resemblance to the person they know.

The urban riots of 1967 brought tanks into our nation’s cities and raised questions about the possibility of a police state. Yet, less than six months later, the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, appointed by President Johnson, issued a thorough and sobering report. “This is our basic conclusion: Our nation is moving toward two societies, one black, one white – separate and unequal. . . . What white Americans have never fully understood – but what the Negro can never forget – is that white society is deeply implicated in the ghetto. White institutions created it, white institutions maintain it, and white society condones it.” According to last week’s executive order, such words are now considered subversive.

I don’t know what you would call a country in which masked government agents arrest a young woman, without warning and without charges, and confine her, without due process, to a detention center 1,600 miles away. Nor what you would call a government that whitewashes our nation’s history of racial struggle. I once called it a police state.

The Power to Name

“L’etat, c’est moi.” Louis XIV

The power to name is an awful power.

Early in the Book of Genesis, even before he has created Eve, God gives Adam the power of naming “every beast of the field and every bird of the heavens.” It is an enormous power, one that elevates man above all the other animals and charges him to subdue the earth and all the creatures on it. God gave that power only to Adam, and it not something to be taken lightly. It is in many ways the equivalent of Prometheus stealing fire from the gods and giving it to humankind (and we know what happened to him).

Somehow, Donald Trump has arrogated that power to himself. We saw it on his first day in office, when he signed executive order 14172, which renamed the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America. With his signature he changed almost 400 years of map making. Despite its policy against “giving immediate recognition to any arbitrary governmental re-naming,” Google immediately caved in, and the deal was done.

Later that day, Trump signed executive order 14168, with the impressively Orwellian name of “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” It asserted that there are only two sexes – a man and a woman – and they are fixed at birth. To define human beings seems an extraordinary assertion of presidential authority, and one I was unable to find in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. Not only does it give enormous power to the federal government, it also denies people their fundamental right to define themselves. It’s a power God didn’t even give to Adam, and it paved the way for executive order 14201 (“Keeping Men Out of Women’s Sports”).

There are many more such instances:

  • Although almost a quarter of Columbia’s students are Jewish, President Trump defined the university as antisemitic and is threatening to withhold $400 million in federal funds.

  • Having for years classified immigrants from Latin America as thugs and criminals, he recently deported three planeloads of Venezuelans without a fig leaf of due process.

  • Accusing South Africa of “government-sponsored race-based discrimination” against whites, he offered Afrikaners expedited refugee status in the U.S.

  • By upending reality and declaring (1) Ukraine the aggressor in its war and (2) President Zelensky a dictator, Trump can now make his own peace with Putin.

And woe to anyone who questions such unprecedented power. The Associated Press’ continued use of the term, Gulf of Mexico, got it banned from covering presidential events. Columbia capitulated and ceded to the Trump administration unprecedented control over university policies. I wrote recently of the torrent of retaliation Gov. Mills brought down on Maine by following current state law rather than submitting to an ex cathedra proclamation from the Oval Office. The president, however, is demanding not just Maine’s compliance, but “a full throated apology from the Governor herself, and a statement that she will never make such an unlawful challenge to the Federal Government again, before this case can be settled.”

And there you have it. Many of these issues are neither simple nor clear cut. The ruling against transgender athletes, for example, is Trump’s most popular policy.  In a democracy, however, we have traditionally debated contentious matters in public forums, from the town meeting to the halls of Congress. But the power to name – to define – bypasses that process and gives extraordinary authority to the namer. President Trump did not ask Governor Mills for her explanation; he demanded her submission. In doing so, he equated the institutional power of the office with the personal power of the man. This is not a good idea. It is also not a good omen.

A Mighty Woman with a Torch

“. . . and her name Mother of Exiles.” Emma Lazarus

Monday was St. Patrick’s Day, named for the patron saint of Ireland and celebrated around the world, especially in cities with large populations of Irish descent.

In the spring that I turned five I was diagnosed with rheumatic fever, which required me to stay in bed from April to October. I had to be carried to the bathroom, and when we visited my grandmother near Cape Cod, I was carted to the beach in a red wagon. When at last the doctor told me I could get out of bed, I excitedly stood up, only to collapse immediately to the floor. I would need to learn to walk again.

My own patron saint through all of this was a young woman named Catherine Maguire, who had recently emigrated from County Longford in the Irish midlands. She was high-spirited, with a ready twinkle and a reddish birthmark over part of her face. She cared for me, played with me, disciplined me, and carried me everywhere for those six months. Later, when I had recovered, she would take my sister and me into New York City for the St. Patrick’s Day parade. Her Aunt Nell had a small railroad flat on Second Avenue, where the elevated trains rattled outside her parlor window, and Robbin and I slept on the couch.

The parade itself was a grand affair, overflowing Fifth Avenue with Hibernian societies and marching bands and politicians from Tammany Hall to Albany, all of them wearing green. It seemed that every New York cop was Irish and Catherine knew them all, so we always had a front row perch.

Even then, in the early 1950s, the Catholic Irish were not fully accepted by the New York establishment. Their ancestors had been coming for well over a century; and after the Great Hunger struck in the mid-1840s, the Irish diaspora exploded. More than two million refugees came to America between 1845 and 1870, swelling the populations of eastern cities, crowding into squalid slums, working 80-hour weeks for a pittance.

"Predictably,” wrote Gregory Couch in The Bonanza King, “the influx provoked a backlash among native-born Americans. Anti-Catholic Yankees regarded the newest wave of desti­tute, starving refugees as 'Saint Patrick's vermin.'"

Gradually, through the rise of their political leaders and the Catholic Church, the newcomers got jobs throughout the city, particularly in the police, fire, and public works departments. By the late 19th century, another great wave of immigrants, primarily from southern and eastern Europe, had taken over the bottom rungs of the economic ladder; the assimilation of the Irish into the American mainstream was under way.

Looking back, it’s hard to imagine their struggles, and yet America remained always a beacon for them. “When the boat sailed into harbor,” Catherine’s younger brother, Hugh, told me years later, “the man next to me said, ‘that’s New York.’

“‘Go on with you now,’ I said. ‘In New York the streets are paved with gold.’”

“When Hugh comes home to visit,” his brother John told me years later in Ireland, “all he can talk about is how much better everything is in America.” By then Hugh had worked his way up managing an A&P in the Bronx and survived a bullet in his stomach while thwarting an attempted robbery.

The Irish were the first large wave of immigrants to come to this country. They came, as did those who followed, because they had few prospects at home. Most didn’t speak English and few could read or write. Labeled gangsters and drunkards, aliens and revolutionaries, their vulnerability and desperation made them ripe for exploitation. Many didn’t survive, but over time those who did worked their way into the fabric of American life. Americans take pride in having given them opportunity, and for many we certainly did. In return they built our country.

When Catherine sailed home to Ireland in 1953, I vowed to find her one day. Twenty years later I walked up the lane in Moyne Cross, County Longford, to the tiny farm on which she and her husband, Pee, were raising their nine children. But that’s a story for another post.

“As Maine goes, so goes the nation.”

"They are still saying, ‘We want men to play in women’s sports’ . . . .So, we’re not going to give them any federal funding, none whatsoever, until they clean that up." Donald Trump after his confrontation with Maine Governor Janet Mills.

It’s been a rough couple of weeks for Maine. It began on February 21st, when Gov. Janet Mills stood up to President Donald Trump at a White House governor’s conference. Before the day was over, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services had launched an investigation into what it called Maine’s violation of Title IX, the 1972 law that prohibits discrimination on the basis of gender. Four days later, after calling no hearings, holding no interviews, and requesting no data, the department declared Maine in violation of Title IX “for allowing male athletes to compete against female athletes.”

That, it turned out, was just the beginning:

  • HHS handed Maine’s case over to the Department of Justice, suggesting that a legal proceeding could follow.

  • Both the departments of Agriculture and Education have also begun investigations into Maine. The latter needs to act quickly, as recently appointed Secretary Linda McMahon has announced her department’s “momentous final mission:” its elimination.

  • A petition to recall Mills garnered almost 30,000 signatures before someone pointed out that state law does not allow the governor to be recalled.

  • The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration cancelled the University of Maine’s multimillion-dollar Maine Sea Grant. The ocean is a critical component of Maine’s economy, and its university was the only university to lose it funding under this grant. UMaine has worked in partnership with NOAA for the last 54 years. After being contacted by Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) the Secretary of Commerce (who overseas NOAA) has agreed to renegotiate the terms and conditions of the contract.

  • The Social Security Administration denied new mothers access to a program that allows them to register their newborns from maternity ward. After inquiries from Senators Collins and Angus King (I-ME), the decision, which had only applied to Maine, was reversed.

  • Paul LePage is threatening to come back to Maine. The former governor, who has described himself as “Donald Trump before Donald Trump became popular,” had moved to Florida after leaving office, only to move back to Maine to challenge Mills in 2022. After losing by 13 percentage points, he went back to Florida. It is now being reported that he is considering challenging moderate Democratic Congressman Jared Golden in Maine’s second district, which is a Trump stronghold. While governor, “LePage was criticized for making controversial remarks regarding abortion, the LGBTQ community, racial minorities, immigration, the death penalty, voting rights, gun control, campaign financing, the government and the environment that sparked widespread national criticism, leading to some calling for his impeachment.”

That’s a lot for one small state to unpack. There are some real issues to debate. Maine’s Human Rights Act, for example, protects the rights of trans students, which puts it in direct conflict with Donald Trump’s decree and puts Janet Mills in a corner.

No, the really troublesome matter is the nature of this administration’s retaliations: they are arbitrary and personal, they come at mindboggling speed and from all directions, and there is so much pettiness in the retributions. Even more concerning is that the victims of these rapid-fire orders – trans people, immigrants, refugees – are so often the most vulnerable and the least popular.

As Martin Niemoller wrote almost 80 years ago:

First they came for the Communists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Communist.
Then they came for the Socialists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Socialist.
Then they came for the trade unionists
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a trade unionist.
Then they came for the Jews
And I did not speak out
Because I was not a Jew.
Then they came for me
And there was no one left
To speak out for me.

Faces

“I became convinced that noncooperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is cooperation with good.” Martin Luther King, Jr.

What struck me, perhaps above all, at the Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington were the faces of the individual people, all kinds of people, young and old, men and women, well off and destitute. When we encounter the Holocaust, we expect to see the unspeakable carnage: the mass deportations at railroad stations; the emaciated bodies in striped pajamas; the corpses stacked in trenches. We do see all those images at the Holocaust Museum, but we also see – really see – the faces of individual people, primarily Jews but also others, before they are disposed of by the cruelest decade in history. We know what will become of these people, but most of them have little idea. What is the young woman with the dark hair and red lips thinking at that moment? What is to be her fate?

Over the arc of history, the speed with which the Holocaust happened is mind-bending. Adolf Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany on January 30, 1933. Exactly four weeks later, a Dutch communist was accused of setting the German parliament building on fire. Hitler declared a state of emergency and rescinded almost all civil liberties, including the right to assemble and the freedom of the press. In late March, a constitutional amendment enabled the Nazi leadership to pass laws, whether constitutional or not, without the consent of Parliament. In July, the Nazi party became the only legal political party in the country.

The Holocaust was present at the creation of the Third Reich. The German parliament passed the first anti-Jewish laws in April 1933. Just two years later it promulgated the Nuremberg Laws, which restricted citizenship to those of German “or related” blood and prohibited intermarriage between Germans and the now-stateless Jews.

Almost from the beginning, the Nazi government called for a boycott of Jewish businesses, forced out Jewish civil servants, lawyers, and other professionals, and sought to obliterate non-Aryan influences on German life – including the wholesale removal of books from libraries. On May 10, 1933, less than three-and-a-half months after Hitler took power, there was a nationwide book burning, during which books by Jews and other disfavored groups were thrown into huge bonfires before cheering crowds. With dissenters and “non-Aryan” groups – from gypsies to gays and lesbians to the mentally ill to Jehovah’s Witnesses – silenced, imprisoned, emigrated, or dead, dissent disappeared, and most of the old economic, political, and social leadership capitulated. Even the Nazi party itself lost its independence. “People often say, okay, the Fuhrer, that's one thing. But the party, that's another matter,” Hitler declared. “No gentlemen. The Fuhrer is the party and the party is the Fuhrer.”

On the way out of the museum I stopped briefly at a new exhibit: Burma’s Path to Genocide, which “explores how the Rohingya, a Muslim minority, went from citizens to outsiders – and became targets of a sustained campaign of genocide.” It began in 2017.

Here again, I cannot shake the contrast between the mass murders and the individual victims, between the efficient killers and the innocent dead. And that, I think, is the point. The first step is always to dehumanize the vulnerable group and thereby rob its people of their individuality. They become other, less than human, scum.

We hear much these days about the evils of individualism, of how its focus on the needs of the self turns into a selfishness that conflicts with the needs of the community. And yet, it is often only the individual who, at great personal risk, can stand up to the crowd. When in doubt, my father used to tell me, say no.

And as the Holocaust Memorial Museum makes so painfully clear, it is only in seeing – really seeing – the unique individuality of each of us that we can recognize the common humanity in all of us.

Two Women of Maine

“It is high time that we all stopped being tools and victims of totalitarian techniques – techniques that, if continued here unchecked, will surely end what we have come to cherish as the American way of life.” Margaret Chase Smith (1950)

“But do not be misled: this is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a President can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation. I believe he cannot.” Janet Mills (2025)

On Thursday, June 1, 1950, on her way to the senate chamber, the Republican senator from Maine ran into the Republican senator from Wisconsin.

“Margaret, you look very serious,” said Joe McCarthy. “Are you going to make a speech?”

“Yes,” Margaret Chase Smith replied, “and you will not like it!”

Her short speech has become known as the “Declaration of Conscience.” Announcing that “I speak as a Republican. I speak as a woman. I speak as a United States senator. I speak as an American,” Smith denounced the smear campaigns and character assassinations that had poisoned political discourse. “Freedom of speech is not what it used to be in America. It has been so abused by some that it is not exercised by others.”

After strongly criticizing the Truman administration, she turned to her own side of the aisle. “The nation sorely needs a Republican victory,” she said. “But I do not want to see the Republican party ride to political victory on the Four Horsemen of Calumny: Fear, Ignorance, Bigotry, and Smear.”

She was speaking directly to McCarthy, whose campaign of slander, accusations, and lies about communist infiltration of the government had gained vociferous public support and intimidated both parties into silence. Although the press and public responded positively to Smith’s speech (“This cool breeze of honesty from Maine can blow the whole miasma out of the nation’s soul,” editorialized the Hartford Courant), McCarthy had powerful backers, including the Kennedy family, and Washington remained fearful and silent. Only six senators signed her declaration, a group McCarthy derided as “Snow White and the Six Dwarfs.” But Smith, the first senator to publicly condemn him, had planted a seed.

More than four years later, in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings, her perseverance paid off. When McCarthy attacked his young associate, Joseph Welch, the army’s attorney responded: “Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness. . . .Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?" The bubble had burst. The senate censured McCarthy later that year. His career was effectively over.

Almost 75 years later, the nation’s governors were meeting in the White House dining room, when this exchange occurred between President Trump and Maine Governor Janet Mills over her state’s refusal to ban transgender athletes from women’s sports.*

“Is Maine here, the governor of Maine?”

“I’m here.”

“Are you not going to comply with it?”

“I’m complying with state and federal laws.”

“We are the federal law.”

“We’re going to follow the law.”

“You’d better comply. Otherwise, you’re not getting any federal funding.”

“We’ll see you in court.”

“Good, I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics.”

Within 24 hours, the U.S. departments of Education, of Health and Human Services, and of Agriculture opened investigations into violations of Title IX, the federal law that bars gender-based discrimination, one into the state’s Department of Education and two into the University of Maine. That’s three investigations by three different federal departments in less than one day.

Transgender sports does not poll particularly well in Maine, and few in either party have rushed to Mills’ support. But like Margaret Chase Smith, she stands her ground.

*The impasse: Maine state law bars discrimination based on gender identity. The Trump administration claims the inclusion of transgender athletes violates federal antidiscrimination law.

Bragging Rights

“Bragg is back.” Pete Hegseth (Feb. 10, 2025)

What follows is a very convoluted story.

Fort Bragg, North Carolina, is the largest military base in the United States. Established in 1918, it was named for Braxton Bragg, who commanded the Army of Tennessee during the Civil War. According to his Wikipedia page,“Bragg is generally considered among the worst generals of the Civil War. Most of the battles he engaged in ended in defeat. Bragg was extremely unpopular with both the officers and ordinary men under his command, who criticized him for numerous perceived faults, including poor battlefield strategy, a quick temper, and overzealous discipline. . . .The losses suffered by Bragg's forces are cited as highly consequential to the ultimate defeat of the Confederate States of America.”

It is a mystery to me why the government chose to name a fort after a man who was a traitor, incompetent, and a slaveholder. In late 2020 Congress sought to rectify that lapse in judgment by directing that Fort Bragg – and the other eight military bases commemorating Confederate officers – be renamed. President Trump vetoed the bill, but both houses overrode his veto in an overwhelmingly bipartisan vote (House: 322-87; Senate: 81-13). How times have changed.

As a result, last year Fort Bragg became Fort Liberty. But not for long. Campaigning against this woke assault on American tradition, Donald Trump vowed to reverse it. And so, this month Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signed a memo renaming the base . . . Fort Bragg, declaring, “Bragg is back.”

Well, yes and no.

Because the 2021 law has not been repealed, the fort is now named for Roland L. Bragg, a deceased World War II private first class from Maine – despite the fact that the renaming commission had explicitly rejected renaming a fort for another soldier with the same name.

Although press reports have Roland Bragg as an obscure private, he strikes me as a fantastic choice. He trained as a paratrooper at Fort Bragg before being sent to Europe in December 1944. For his bravery during the Battle of the Bulge, Bragg was awarded the Silver Star and a Purple Heart. Modest and self-effacing, he was discharged at the end of the war, still a private first class.

It seems extraordinary that such a decorated a soldier could retire with the army’s third-lowest rank – a feat only surpassed by my late friend Lee Anderson Adams, who spent six years in the army reserves. Periodically promoted to private first class, Lee inevitably got busted back. He was ultimately mustered out as a Private E-2, a nearly impossible feat.

According to his daughter Diane Watts, Roland Bragg rarely talked of his service. “They tried to promote me, but I wouldn’t accept it,” he told her. “I did not want to have to give an order that sent another young man to his death.”

I can think of no more worthy soldier to be honored. Despite its Orwellian path and suspect motives, the government somehow arrived at the right solution.

But there’s one final twist to this story: there is now an effort to delete Roland Bragg’s name from Wikipedia.

“This will be controversial,” an editor wrote. “Bragg was a non-notable soldier until 2 days ago, when he was used to justify the renaming of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg. He was not and is not independently notable except for that.”

This has led to a lively internet debate, with those in favor of keeping Bragg arguing that he was heroic in battle and, anyhow, he now has a fort named after him. Those opposed view Bragg as a pawn of the Trump administration’s cynical agenda.

I vote “Keep” for three reasons:

  1. The valiant private is infinitely more worthy than the traitorous general.

  2. The removal process has become a bait-and-switch maneuver that will make us forget why the fort was renamed and consign the wrong Bragg to oblivion.

  3. As a former enlisted man, I am delighted to see my people finally get their due.

Course update

The four-session course, Huck and James: a discussion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and Jamesby Percival Everett, will start in about a month. We still have a few spots left. If you are interested, please email me at jamesgblaine2@gmail.com. Thanks.

Alexei Navalny

“Will no one rid me of this meddlesome priest?” Henry II *

Alexei Navalny died a year ago today in a Russian prison in the village of Kharp in western Siberia. He was 47. It’s hard to believe it was only a year ago, so quickly has he been forgotten. But oblivion is what Vladimir Putin wanted when he sent Navalny to Polar Wolf, a “regime colony” north of the Arctic Circle – as oblivion is what all autocrats want when for all dissidents.

Polar Wolf is a bleak place, especially in winter. “It hasn’t gotten colder than −32°C [−25.6°F],” Navalny wrote in his diary. “Even at that temperature you can walk for more than half an hour, but only if you are sure you can grow a new nose, ears, and fingers.” He was only allowed to walk in his solitary exercise yard – which was 11 steps by 3 steps – at 6:30 a.m., long before the sun came up.

Polar Wolf was the last leg of a three-and-a-half-year journey that had begun in August 2020, when Navalny was medically evacuated to a German hospital after having been poisoned with the nerve agent, Novichok. He blamed Putin. The following January he returned to Russia, where, even before he had taken a single step on his country’s soil, he was arrested and imprisoned. He was subsequently condemned to an escalating series of prison terms. “The number of years does not matter,” he wrote. “ I understand perfectly well that, like many political prisoners, I am serving a life sentence. Where ‘life’ is defined by either the length of my life or the length of the life of this regime.” The regime outlived him.

In another time, Nalvany would be considered a hero, a martyr even, for his relentless and principled resistance to Vladimir Putin’s Russian state. But in this age, when “those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all ‘suckers’ because ‘there is nothing in it for them,'" Alexei Navalny is just another loser. The values he displayed – courage, steadfastness, integrity – were once considered part of the rite of passage to adulthood. Now they are scorned.

Nalvany was not perfect. Early in his career he aligned himself with the far-right “Great Russia” nationalist movement, which was stridently and ethnically nationalist, but he later retracted those views. In 2020 he spoke in support of Black Lives Matter. Alexei Nalvany was human. “The ghastliest days in prison are the birthdays of close family, especially children,” he wrote. . . .“But it is on my children’s birthdays that I am particularly aware of why I’m in jail. We need to build the Beautiful Russia of the Future for them to live in. Zakhar, happy birthday! I really miss you and love you very much!”

The opposite of a brave man or a brave woman is not a coward. At some point, we are all afraid. No, the opposite of a brave person is a bully. The brave person confronts injustice. The bully assaults the vulnerable. The brave person stands up to the powerful. The bully picks on the powerless. The brave person is willing to stand alone. The bully piles on.

The murder of Alexei Navalny, which had begun three-and-a-half years earlier with an attempted poisoning, ended on February 16, 2024, in the hospital at Polar Wolf, where he was taken for malnourishment and other ailments he attributed to his mistreatment.

“I’m an optimist,” he wrote from prison, “and I look on the bright side of my dark existence. I have as much fun as I can.”

* After Henry, the King of England and ruler of most of France, allegedly uttered these words, four knights set off from Normandy for Canterbury, where they murdered the archbishop, Thomas Becket, at the altar of his cathedral. The year was 1170.

Note: Several of you pointed out that in my post on the course offering (Huck and James), the link to sign up led nowhere. I plead geriatric ignorance for confusing a URL with an email. If you are interested in participating, please email me at jamesgblaine2@gmail.com. We already are halfway to our minimum enrollment and a third of a way to our maximum enrollment.  It should be fun.

Huck and James

This is the first of a series of Zoom classes I’ll be offering from time to time on a variety of topics. All will follow the format outlined below. If enough people are interested, I will schedule the class about a month from now to give you time to read the two books, which are both wonderful reads. I will also reach out to try to accommodate everyone’s schedule, if that is even possible these days.

Please let me know if you are interested by replying to www.jamesgblaine2.com

I’m excited for the discussion and others to follow.

Best,
Jamie

Huck and James

A discussion of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain and James by Percival Everett.

The course will explore the two novels in four sessions.
Each session will meet once a week and last 45 minutes.
Class size: minimum of 8, maximum of 12.
Format: discussion group.
Cost: $75 ($18.75 per session)
Readings: the two books
Prerequisites: none

Class 1: Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
What did you think of the book? What did you like/not like about it? The novel was published in 1885 about events taking place 20 years earlier. How does it stand up 140 years later? Think yourself back in time and compare what your reactions would have been then and now. Why do you think this has been the most banned book in America from its publication to the present?

 Class 2: James
What did you think of the book? What did you like/not like about it? What’s the significance of the title? In what ways does Everett’s story follow and/or diverge from Twain’s story? In what ways did this book really stretch your mind?

Class 3: Jim and James, Huck and Tom
What role does each of these characters play in the books? Are James and Jim the same person? What unites them? What differentiates them? How does Jim’s role evolve? Is Huck the same person in both books? How does his role evolve from Twain’s book to Everett’s

Class 4: From the Mississippi to America
How do these two novels, taken together, affect your thinking about America, past and present?

Mirth

"A joyful heart is good medicine, but a crushed spirit dries up the bones.” Proverbs 17:22

The older I get, the more I gravitate toward people who make me laugh. Not the tepid laughter of feigned politeness. Nor the heartless laughter of the bully. Nor the melancholy laughter of the doomed. Rather, it’s the laughter you feel in the depths of your being. During the pandemic, five very old friends, who had grown lonely in their confinement, began to gather on zoom for a ritual we dubbed Quarantini Time. Its real purpose was to laugh. We have continued it ever since. It has not been without sadness. One of our number died just a year ago. Our laughter helps us heal the pain.

Most mornings when I am at home, I walk along Main Street to the post office on the far side of town. Along the way, I run into my friend Aaron, an ear-ringed artist who also serves, in the summer season, as the shopkeeper of his wife’s store. When he sees me coming, he rushes out to the sidewalk for our morning conversation, which inevitably begins with his latest joke. He has a seemingly endless supply of jokes, many of them stupid, often crude, and inevitably politically incorrect. What they have in common is their ability to make me laugh, particularly as Aaron is a pitch-perfect storyteller who makes no effort to contain his own glee. I laugh, not out of politeness, but from deep in my gut, as much at the telling as at the punch line. I can think of no better way to start my day.

This has never been more vital than now, when the world has become such a serious and angry place. In Washington we have a gang taking apart our government – perhaps even our country – whose only smile is a scowl and whose idea of a joke is to ridicule vulnerable people. They are opposed by those for whom laughter has become a luxury in dark times. It may seem absurd, even callous, to talk about laughter in the face of malevolence. Or it may seem like a futile effort to escape from reality. But to me it is an assertion of humanity in a world that has grown increasingly inhumane. As we are told in the Book of Proverbs, “a joyful heart is good medicine.” The primary author of Proverbs is King Solomon, the wisest of the ancient kings of Israel.

I am writing this in California, where we have come to visit our grandchildren. Yesterday my granddaughter Molly asked me how old I was.

“I am 79,” I answered.

“79?” she mused, as if that were an unfathomable age. Then she added in a wistful voice, “I want you to stay around so you can meet my children.” Molly is six.

I may not be around for my great-grandchildren, but I feel younger and happier for the laughs their future parents constantly provide me. I also feel galvanized to work for a better world for those I will never meet.

My enduring image of a dystopian future, which has been with me since childhood, is a place where everything is gray – the skies, the buildings, the clothes, the people’s faces. It is a place where nobody laughs. It is, I think, a modern rendering of Dante’s ninth circle of hell, where the worst sinners are condemned to a realm, not of fire, but of ice – a place without warmth and without laughter.

Call it escapism if you will, but I can think of no better antidote than laughter.

Babies and Water

Babies and water are two words that have been in the news a lot lately. It seems that we don’t have enough of either, and so there is a great push to get more of both. If you drill down a little deeper, however, you find that the issue is not so much that we don’t have enough babies or water; it’s that we don’t have enough of them in the places we need want them.

Water

“Water, water everywhere, Nor any drop to drink.” Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

Let’s start with water. The Los Angeles wildfires, which to date have burned tens of thousands of acres, caused almost $50 billion in damage, and killed 29 people, were the result of a lethal combination of extremely dry conditions and powerful winds. The fires spurred a presidential demand to bring in water from northern California, immediately and in huge quantities. This is not a new concept. Humans have been moving water around for millennia, and we have learned along the way that it’s not quite as simple as opening valves in a couple of reservoirs and declaring “victory.” The billions of gallons that spewed out from those Central Valley dams cannot flow uphill and over mountains. Consequently, the water will never reach Los Angeles. It is now, however, unavailable to the farmers who will need it later in the year.

In the weeks and months ahead, we will be hearing a great deal about the notion that a river is little more than a pipe, whose function is to transport water wherever and whenever we want it – and that any drop of a river’s water that makes it to the ocean is wasted. This is dangerous nonsense. If it were true, the Colorado River, whose polluted dregs trickle into the sand several miles before short of the Gulf of California, would be the most successful river in America. Unfortunately, it is dying, and this kind of thinking is one more nail in its coffin. Ironically, the Colorado provides Los Angeles about half its fresh water. It would be far better for the future of the city if we spent more effort protecting this majestic river and less engaging in political stunts.

Babies

“When she says she’s a pronatalist, she’s putting her life on the line in service of her belief system.” Malcolm Collins

As for babies, there is growing concern about falling birth rates worldwide, from five live births per woman in 1950 to 2.3 today – and projected to be 2.1 by 2050. Not all that long ago, this would have been considered a good thing. As global population more than doubled to 8.2 billion after 1970, the world focused on the impact of such growth on the world’s resources. Now, thanks in no small part to rising living standards and female autonomy, birth rates plummeting. Countries are worried about sustaining their populations and providing enough young people to take care of their old people. The fear of “population collapse” has spawned a new pronatalist movement.

But as with water, there is more to the story of babies. Right now, it is the rich nations – from the U.S. to Europe to China – that are experiencing the greatest declines in birth rates. On the other hand, more than half of the world’s babies will soon be born in sub-Saharan Africa. Neither at our own southern border nor in our inner cities do I hear many people complaining about a shortage of young children. In fact, even as migration is projected to be the sole driver of their population growth, rich nations are locking their doors against those who might actually be able to help.

We might want to rethink these two matters. For each of them asks us is to re-imagine ourselves, not as exploiters of the planet, but as co-inhabitants, living peacefully with our neighbors and in harmony with the earth.

Blessed are . . .

Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy.  Matthew 5:7 

I am not a very good Christian, but last week I was proud to be an Episcopalian.

If you have not seen Mariann Edgar Budde’s Inauguration Day homily at the National Cathedral, you can watch this short clip. At the nation’s traditional interfaith prayer service the Episcopal Bishop of Washington spoke directly to President Trump for only two minutes. She didn’t lecture him. She didn’t confront him. Speaking softly and from her heart, she asked only that he show mercy to those who are vulnerable and afraid. Her plea was not well received.

In my mind, there are, broadly speaking, two kinds of Christians: those who like people and those who don’t. This distinction is not new. On the one hand, there is the church of the Inquisition, formally known as the Holy Office for the Propagation of the Faith, which Pope Sixtus IV established in 1478 to stamp out heresy in Spain. Tomás de Torquemada, the priest he appointed Grand Inquisitor, was well versed in the techniques of torture, and during his 15-year tenure he burned an estimated 2,000 people at the stake. On the other hand, there is the tradition of Francis of Assisi, who ministered to lepers and preached to the birds, and who taught his followers that humans are members of – not masters over – the natural world. "Your God is of your flesh,” he preached. “He lives in your nearest neighbor, in every man."

Sadly, but not surprisingly, the Christian church, in all its denominations and manifestations, has been more Tomás than Francis. The Grand Inquisitor has dominated its history, and as a result, the church has done far more harm than good in the world. You can see its offspring today, in this country and elsewhere, in the guise of Christian Nationalism, which is little more than the theological arm of right-wing nationalist movements.

But for me, it is Saint Francis who is at the core of the gospel, and it is to him we turn for solace and for healing – and for the courage to face adversity. He points us, not to the Ten Commandments with all their “shalt nots” but to the Beatitudes with their “Blessed ares.” Jesus’ poetic sermon on the mount appeals to our inherent goodness, instead of our innate depravity.

It is here that the church has shined through the ages. It has borne witness to almost every liberation movement, from eastern Europe, where Catholic priests went underground to lead the struggle against totalitarian regimes, to Central America, where liberation theology was born. In the mid-20th century, in virtually every protest march against apartheid – whether in South Africa or in America – religious leaders were on the front lines.

I think of Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German pastor whom the Nazis arrested for his outspoken resistance to the Holocaust and hanged less than a month before the end of the war in Europe. And of Martin Luther King, Jr., a Baptist minister who became the symbol of our own civil rights movement until he was assassinated in 1968. While all these people were committed to non-violence, they were forced to endure horrific violence from those whose authority they threatened.

Mariann Edgar Budde stands in this tradition of people who, in the name of mercy, stand up to power. Thank god.

Under Our Feet

“Heaven is under our feet as well as over our heads.”

- Henry Thoreau

The state of Maine has sued big oil over climate change. Good for Maine. And good luck to Maine.

The objective is laudable. The timing could hardly be worse. After four years of unctuously pretending to be working to combat climate change, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, and their like have returned from the underworld to reclaim their place in the sun. Despite the years of hypocrisy, I hope they will not scrap their decades of research, for they know the damage they have done better than anyone else. As of Monday, though, it’s back to “drill, baby, drill.” No more wind. No more solar – for as Ralph Nader once said, “the oil industry does not own the sun.”

The lawsuit, which was filed in late November, makes Maine the ninth state (plus the District of Columbia) to pursue this innovative legal path. The argument is straightforward. “For over half a century, these companies chose to fuel profits instead of following their science to prevent what are now likely irreversible, catastrophic climate effects,” said Maine Attorney General Aaron Frey. “In so doing, they bur0dened the State and our citizens with the consequences of their greed and deception.” Note the phrase, “their science”: This suit argues the oil companies knew exactly what they were doing.

The defendants dragged out the usual suspects. Exxon Mobil blamed consumers and touted over $20 billion invested to lower emissions. Shell agreed that action is needed now, but said the courtroom is the wrong place to do it. A spokesman for the American Petroleum Institute blasted these “meritless, politicized lawsuits against a foundational American industry and its workers.” If this all has a familiar ring, think big tobacco.

Meanwhile, the red states have counterattacked. Alabama and 19 others have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to stop these lawsuits, which “threaten not only our system of federalism and equal sovereignty among States, but our basic way of life.” Alabama (again) has also joined 10 other states to sue three large investment firms (BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street) for promoting “climate activism,” thus violating antitrust laws and advancing the goals of the loathsome ESG (environmental, social, and governance) movement.

People who are younger than I, of which there are a great many, appear to think this matter of climate change is a big deal, probably because they will have to bear its consequences. So why is the issue so consistently ignored in the public arena? One reason is that the overwhelming size and complexity of the problem leaves ordinary people feeling helpless.

A more insidious reason is that our representatives have failed us. Joe Biden tried his best on this issue, but the considerable progress he made was rolled back in a day. Most Americans want climate action, but they apparently don’t want it badly enough to make the politicians pay attention. During the 2024 election, climate change ranked 19th out of 28 issues in pre-election polls. Nineteen is a number political consultants treat with contempt, and so they instructed their Democratic candidates to pay little more than lip service to the future of the earth. It’s not a winning issue. “It’s the economy, stupid.”

How can the future of the earth not be a winning issue? We know where the current Republican Party stands, but what if, instead of genuflecting to the latest polls, Democrats stood – and stood up – for principle? What if, instead of following the pollsters, they tried to lead the people? Consultants are paid to get their candidates elected. Then it’s on to the next campaign, while the rest of us watch our elected representatives jeopardize the future of our children and grandchildren.

April 22nd, 2025, three months from yesterday, is the 55th anniversary of Earth Day, the largest secular holiday in the world. It’s time to revive the energy and the hope of those early days by turning out and speaking up forcefully for the earth on which every living being depends. Mark your calendars.

Not While the Fires are Still Burning

It took a Frenchman to point out to Americans their genius for community. Almost 200 years ago Alexis de Tocqueville spent nine months traveling throughout the United States. Out of that came his two-volume study, Democracy in America, in which he argued that the strength of the young republic derived from Americans’ penchant for creating voluntary associations to solve common problems. He particularly admired the New England town where all the citizens gathered to govern themselves.

Twenty-five years ago, political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, in which he discussed the significant decline in Americans’ community involvement, a decline he observed in all the kinds of voluntary associations that de Tocqueville had described as this country’s unique national strength. Putnam also noted that the decline was accompanied by a growing distrust of the institutions of government.

One of the main reasons that people join together in voluntary associations is to do things they could not otherwise do by themselves. Moreover, because they are acting with others, rather than alone, the things they accomplish have a far better chance of getting widespread support. This is what makes a community. In particular, when people find themselves facing a life-threatening situation, they quickly realize that if they do not all pull together, they will face disaster. This is what holds the community together during tough times.

I write this as Los Angeles is facing a new onslaught of high winds over burning dry land. The situation has already become a disaster for hundreds of thousands of people left homeless. With the new waves of fire and wind, and the increasing numbers of dead, it is now beyond a disaster; it is a tragedy.

Yet, with the flames continuing to reignite and spread, with firefighters literally burned out, water in short supply, and residents terrified, the reaction from 3,000 miles away seems less to join together to help put the fires out and rebuild a burning city, than to look for scapegoats to blame. Instead of calls for unity, we are treated to puerile, vulgar and inflammatory nicknames and efforts to rile up the partisans. Instead of compassion, we are confronted with a cold-heartedness that will make bringing us together in the future both more difficult and more unlikely.

Most news reports have focused on the big picture: over 40,000 acres burned; 150,000 people evacuated; winds gusting up to 100 mph; prolonged drought; 24 dead and many more expected. That is the breadth of this disaster. The personal stories tell the depth of the tragedy. Which is why it is far easier to come together in a small community, where the victims are our neighbors, than in a large country, where the people are strangers. But what is a nation but a community writ large? What are these united states but a community of communities? E pluribus unum, “out of many, one,” is our country’s motto. It’s right there on our money, which they say we Americans worship above all else.

Yes, the size of the entity makes a big difference, but the values should not change. During the Great Depression and World War II, Franklin Roosevelt gave a series of informal radio addresses, which were called Fireside Chats, in which he invited millions of listeners into his living room and spoke to them as neighbors. He sought to make a national community during some of the country’s hardest years.

There will be time enough for constructive (and, I have little doubt, destructive) assessments as we set out – as a country – to rebuild much of southwest California when the fires are finally out.

A Tale of Two Doormats

January 6, 2025. Fear seems to have become the emotion of these times, and not without reason. Be afraid, we are told, of the violence in the streets and on the internet, of the immigrants at the border and the enemies within, of the different and of the unknown. Above all, be afraid for the future.

When danger is everywhere, how can we feel safe?

One response is to shrink our world – to make it as small, sheltered, and homogenous as possible – so that we can more easily distinguish our allies from our enemies. “There are three kinds of people,” my late friend Sam once said to me, “those I know and I like; those I know and I don’t like; and those I don’t know and I don’t like.” And so, we are taught to avoid people who don’t look like us, who don’t talk like us, who don’t dress like us. In both our real and our virtual lives, we increasingly seek out communities of people who seem just like us. In times when the threats seem especially great, we turn for protection to leaders who tell us they are tough.

Fear has always been critical to human survival, and we need to pay attention to it. But the powerful few have too often exploited our so they can keep us compliant. And when they have scared us into silence, they offer us “consumer goods in exchange for mindlessness,” as Timothy Snyder writes in On Freedom. He was describing Soviet puppets in eastern Europe in the 1970s. Today, in this country, “Drill, baby, drill” has become the mantra of those who offer us cheap gasoline in exchange for the future of the earth. This is not a good deal for my grandchildren.

Fear is not the only way to engage with the world. Remember the excitement of going to an unknown place for the first time and savoring the cacophony of sounds and colors and curious customs? Tourism wasn’t even a word until 1811, and now it’s a $2 trillion industry. And while the tourist business seems bent on sanitizing the experiences of its “customers,” the attraction for many is still to escape the known and the safe, to be open to the new, and to hope for the unexpected.

Or remember when the mats at front doors said “Welcome” instead of “Beware of Dog.”

In reality, we thrive on openness and diversity, a word that Project 2025 has promised to delete from our politics. But beset by fear, we seek refuge in safe places and small pleasures. We are apprehensive about the future, but we are tired of the acrimony, and so we turn inward. Openness. Generosity. Wonder. Kindness. Compassion. Integrity. These are some of the values we jeopardize when we do so.

Above all, perhaps, we worry that we lack courage. But courage need not be heroic. There are ways it can assert itself besides lying down in front of a tank or getting hauled off to prison. For many of us, it can be simply trying to hold onto our values in these times, both when we are afraid and when we are comfortable. That will take courage enough.

The Second Term

I first met Peter Rousmaniere in the fall of 1959 at a small school in a small town in the middle of Massachusetts. Over the intervening years he has become a wide-ranging thinker, with a special expertise in workman’s compensation and immigration issues, a combination that gives him a unique perspective on the three-way intersection of immigration, labor, and health care. Recently, he sent me the following description of what Donald Trump’s second term might look like, particularly in its early stages. It is the most insightful analysis I have read to date.

We are seeing signs of Trump's classic style of leadership, more organized and more forceful than the first time around. I found the best depiction of his style in a book on group psychology, Mind and Society, written by Pascal Boyer, who is a specialist in African tribal culture. In 2019, I compared Boyer’s depiction of tribal leadership and Trump's behavior. I'm updating that below with specific references to what we have seen in the last few weeks.

The Bargaining King

Trump frames his leadership story as an economic success. He exploits popular beliefs about economics, namely that economics involves bargaining in which a win for one is a visible loss for the other – a zero-sum game. This is why tariffs came up so quickly and will be a constant theme, as they represent a stylized form of bargaining that looks to people like a zero sum (rather than a win-win) game. We already see that Trump is enjoying a public victory in his tariff demands on Canada, where [Prime Minister Justin] Trudeau announced that Canadians are spending a lot more money on border surveillance. Trudeau is Trump's kind of foil: a pretty boy whom you can throw onto the mat with one clean, quick maneuver. With Mexico’s president, Claudia Sheinbaum, we are seeing something quite different – which seems to be a pattern among women heads of state regarding Trump. Basically, they don't take any shit. Mexico has a strong bargaining position with the United States in several ways, not least of which is that the country is trending toward building very strong economic ties with China. Sheinbaum will not be thrown onto the mat

Stripping Away Government Control

Trump promotes the right of private ownership to have its way. It isn't so much a dislike of public programs, such as Medicare, as an instinctive need to have good things flow from him. “L'etat, c'est moi." This includes stripping away government bureaucracy and replacing it with personal power. (Trump's billionaire and Heritage Foundation flocks must consequently contend with his progressive impulses, which are based on his need to have all good things flow from him.) Count on Trump trying to sell the Postal Service to private parties. This will be a grand, visible game in which, dressed in regal clothes, he will dispense with the Postal Service as if it were a piece of land he’s granting to a vassal. When privatization has occurred, there have been reduced service frequency (such as no Saturday delivery), closures of postal facilities (such as thousands of village post offices), price increases (such as doubling first-class postage), and workforce reductions (by as much as a third).

One big show of stripping away government control will be the destruction of environmental regulation by government. He knows that people pay close attention to the price of gasoline as a proxy for the state of the economy; and he characterizes environmental initiatives as the work of a cabal. We are hearing a lot about how this cabal has constrained the production of oil.

Another Trump support of private ownership is to dispense with any serious regulation of Internet giants and artificial intelligence. It is not well understood by the public that these giants and AI depend upon complete discretion to use of the bonanza of free-to-grasp data as they see fit. A key feature of economic growth, at the company or national level, is the new provision of really cheap resources. Social media and artificial intelligence draw upon essential resources that are virtually or entirely free. And these giants demand complete autonomy on how to apply these resources. Thus, we see a shocking degree of steps by big business to bend their knee.

With regard to cryptocurrencies, Trump has perceived that the public – particularly young men –  view cryptocurrencies as their way to make a fortune. There will be a crypto bubble, enabled in part by a reversal in government policy of crypto. This will be easy to do because Elizabeth Warren’s and SEC policies, which suppressed crypto, were out of date and subject for reversal at some point in the near future. Trump will be like the baseball player who walks home from third with the bases loaded and declares he hit a home run.

Moral Degenerates and Traitors

It is important for Trump to find individuals and groups he can call moral degenerates. He has used the fascist depiction of people with impure blood to describe poor migrants. A key feature of tribal leadership, which Trump has adopted, is the castigation and punishment of disloyal people and parties – people he can call traitors. Fauci is one of them, but there are thousands of others on a private list he or one of his retainers has.

Free Riders

This group includes perceived beneficiaries of DEI, such as Black presidents of Ivy League colleges, as well as pretty much the entire immigrant community. Biden presented Trump an enormous gift when he admitted into the United States millions of temporary visa holders and large numbers of asylum seekers. This surge, amounting to at least three million people in the last three years, generated tons of local news stories about the demand for shelter and education, whose costs were borne by American cities and states. Reducing overall immigration, however, puts Trump in a conflicted situation. On the one hand, in his view every immigrant is a free rider. On the other hand, thousands of businesses depend on these immigrants – from high tech firms to Texas home builders to Wisconsin dairy farmers. And there is only so much he can do by executive action that would not be bottled up in lawsuits. (I believe that mass deportation will collapse early in 2025.) So, Trump needs Congress, in particular the Senate, to pass a major front-page story on immigration reform. As someone who follows immigration closely, I expect a Senate initiative sometime in 2025.

Merry Christmas

We’re getting near that beautiful Christmas season that people don’t talk about anymore,” said Donald Trump early in his first term. “They don’t use the word Christmas because it’s not politically correct. . . .Well, guess what? We’re saying Merry Christmas again.

Thank you very much, Sir, but I’ve been saying Merry Christmas for almost 80 years. Why do you feel the need to take credit for everything?

Twenty or so years ago, Bill O’Reilly warned us that “creeping secularism and pressure groups like the ACLU” had declared “War on Christmas” and were demanding that creches be removed from the public square. The right counterattacked with a vengeance. And here we are.

For many, this weaponization of Christmas has injected an unwanted level of anxiety into the holiday season. Do I say the politically correct but blandly meaningless “Happy Holidays” or the ethnically offensive but jolly “Merry Christmas?” What is a well-meaning fellow to do?

In truth, Christmas has been problematic since the beginning. Learning that three Maji had come from the East seeking the new king of the Jews, King Herod of Judea ordered the killing of all the young boys in Bethlehem just to be safe. Sixteen centuries later both the English Parliament (1647) and the Puritan city of Boston (1659) outlawed Christmas altogether, denouncing it as “popish.” These acts irritated the more fun-loving working classes, who were deprived of yet another holiday without their consent. France followed suit after its Revolution in 1789 and –  in one of the earliest examples of wokeism – renamed the traditional “three kings cake” the “equality cake.”

I say Merry Christmas because that is the tradition in which I was raised. For most of this country’s history, Christianity has operated as a kind of state religion, whose power and pervasiveness have overwhelmed other faiths. It’s time to move on – or at least to read again the First Amendment, which begins: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.” Despite 235 years of litigation, those words still seem straightforward to me.

So when I say Merry Christmas to a Moslem or a Jew or an atheist, I’m not sticking my figurative thumb in their eye. I’m celebrating the season in my way, and I hope they will do the same to me. It’s no coincidence that many religions have important festivals at this time of year, when the darkest days of winter herald the coming light, when death foretells rebirth. Isn’t that what we are really celebrating on this earth at this time? And isn’t the diversity of those celebrations a reason for rejoicing?

Merry Christmas should be a greeting, not a weapon.

And so, as Fred said to his uncle Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol:

“But I am sure I have always thought of Christmas time when it has come round, — not only its religious part, but everything else — as a good time; a kind, forgiving, charitable, pleasant time; the only time I know of, in the long calendar of the year, when men and women seem by one consent to open their shut-up hearts freely, and to think of people below them as if they really were fellow travelers to the grave, and not another race of creatures bound on other journeys. And therefore, uncle, though it has never put a scrap of gold or silver in my pocket, I believe that it has done me good, and will do me good; and I say yes to Christmas!”

“And so, as Tiny Tim said, 'A Merry Christmas to us all; God bless us, everyone!’”

Beauty

Beauty is truth, truth beauty, —that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. 

— John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”

The last act of my first and only live performance of Tristan and Isolde was nearing its end, and I had grown restless. There is not a lot of leg room at the Metropolitan Opera House, especially in the cheap seats (which, by the way, are not cheap), and Richard Wagner’s opera about love and death was almost four hours old. And then came “Der Liebestod,” the famous aria in which Isolde sings over Tristan’s dead body and then dies herself as the curtain comes down.

I was blown away. The aria is 18 minutes long, and as I sat listening, my knees stopped aching and my body stopped twitching. Even though I am tone deaf, I had never heard such beauty as this music. After sitting in stunned silence for a few minutes, I joined the rest of the audience in a long standing ovation.

The composer of “Der Liebestod” was a terrible human being, a virulent antisemite who, in his essay, “Jewishness in Music,” railed against Jewish artists for degrading European culture. Fifty years after his death, he would become Hitler’s favorite composer.

This contradiction has presented a problem for many, especially in Wagner’s homeland. In a New York Times review of a Wagner exhibit in Berlin (“Germany Reckons with Wagner: Cultural Jewel, or National Shame?”), the critic, Ben Miller, leads with, “Few composers inspire such a mix of appreciation and disgust as Richard Wagner.” How can a person create such achingly beautiful music, while simultaneously espousing such vile opinions? How can a virulent anti-Semite have also composed “Der Liebestod,” which made me cry the first time I heard it?

We all know of artists who are mean-spirited, cantankerous, egotistical. Picasso comes to mind, as does Hemingway, as not especially nice people. Ezra Pound was a narcissist and psychopath who praised both eugenics and the Holocaust. Norman Mailer almost stabbed his wife to death. The list goes on and on. In fact, it may well be longer than the list of sympathetic artists. And while it shouldn’t be surprising that geniuses are complicated and often ill-tempered, I like to think that beauty comes from a fundamentally good heart.

We live in world where new atrocities are uncovered almost daily, where nastiness is admired and meanness is too often mistaken for strength, where bullies masquerade as saviors. None of this is new, of course, but I want to believe that art offers an alternative – a more uplifting – view. That’s why one of the first acts of dictators after seizing power is to silence the artists – as if beauty itself were subversive of autocratic rule. Which I believe it to be.

And that brings me back to Richard Wagner. I will never know how a person with such venom in his soul could produce such beautiful music. This business of good and evil, it seems, is more complicated than it might at first appear. But I do believe this: that the world needs beauty, perhaps now more than ever.

Ladies Day

It could have happened like this:
Imagine it’s Ladies Day at Mar-a-Lago, and the Big Donors are handing out what we used to call the spoils [1] to reward “the ladies” for their service to the GOP. Let’s listen in.

 – First up is Elsie Stefanik.
– I think it’s Elise. What about the UN? She lives in New York, so she won’t have to commute. [2]
– Great idea. Remember when Khruschev banged his shoe on the desk there? That’s the kind of thing Steffy’ll do. Plus, she went to Harvard.
– We don’t talk about that anymore.
– Neither does Harvard.

– Tulsi Gabbard. What do we know about her?
– She was smart enough to get out of the Democrat party.
– Well then, let’s give her intelligence!
– Central or National?
– What’s the difference?
– How do I know? Let’s give her National. It sounds more important.

– Kimberly Guilfoyle.
– This one’s a little tricky. The Trumps don’t want her around, especially now that Junior is dating a debutante.
– She’s not a debutante. She’s 38.
– Young enough to be Kimberly’s daughter.
– Here’s what an anonymous source told People magazine: [He reads] "Kim is not a nice person and always wants the limelight. Don and Kim are over but they are going to offer her some kind of an administrative position so she will be happy." Apparently, “she loves the power and lifestyle.”
– So, we need to get her far away from here. But where?
– Greece is available.
– Great. Let’s get her on the phone.

– Hi, Kimberly, this is the Big Donors calling. We’re discussing jobs in the Trump administration . . . and you’re getting Greece. How’s that sound?
– I’m getting Grease?!! Thanks, Big Donors. I am over the moon! [Call ends]
– Oh, I’m going to be a star! Wikipedia says that “Grease was a raunchy, raw, aggressive, vulgar show.” It sounds so perfect. [She starts singing “Summer Nights,” imagining herself as Sandy in a revival of the Broadway hit.]

Then Don Junior posted on X: "I am so proud of Kimberly. She loves America and she always has wanted to serve the country as an Ambassador. She will be an amazing leader for America First." [3]

– Wait a minute. They meant Greece, the country?!! The place with all those ruins and Aristotles? [4] Damn those homonyms!

And thus, another highly qualified ambassador is appointed to represent America First.

[1] In 1883, the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act replaced the old “spoils system” with the “merit system,” which was intended to be untainted by partisan politics. It’s now known as “the deep state,” and Project 2025 promises to get rid of it.
[2] She lives in Schuylerville in Northern Saratoga County.
[3] Athens is 5,782 miles from Palm Beach.
[4] Presumably, the philosopher and Jackie O’s second husband.